Nausea Medialis

This weekend FOSDEM '08, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, took place in Brussels. It started with the Beer event on friday evening - which I did not attend, I'm not much of a beer fan :-P. Sunday's programme looked like the most interesting to me, with a lineup of talks about Drupal, OpenWRT, suspend, and interaction between the kernel, HAL, udev and networkmanager.

This was one of Asus' first offerings in the WLAN area, and in the time it has been on the market it has built up a loyal userbase, who appreciate the device because of its extensibiliy and hackability ^_^. Numerous custom firmwares have been produced to use the device's capabilities to the fullest - Oleg's firmware for example - and also OpenWRT, although not specifically intended for the WL-500G Deluxe, is an excellent solution for this.

Okay. You guys know how fond I am of tinkering and breaking things :-). Well, today, I discovered once again how fabulous OpenWRT is. Those familiar with Linux will know cross-compiling can be a pain. Routers and other embedded devices often run on non-x86 architectures (my router, an Asus WL-500G Deluxe, is a MIPS-based device), which means you have to set up some sort of cross compilation environment, and that takes time. Well, with OpenWRT, there's no need to go through all of that.